NewsBits: NoSQL Riak to live on as Basho assets bought

These are the database and developer news bits for the week ending August 25th brought to you by Compose. In this edition:

Riak gets bought for open sourcing.

There's a new PostgreSQL admin tool in OmniDB 2.0.

Check your SQL for anti-patterns with SQLCheck.

Is JavaScript good with key/value stores.

Mapping other worlds with PostgreSQL and PostGIS.

Go 1.9 has finally shipped.

Better CQL with gocqlx.

And finally, what's inside a fake RAM chip?

Here are the NewsBits:

Database Bits

Riak - It's been announced that what remains of Basho, developer of the NoSQL Riak database, are being acquired by Bet365. Bet365 are Gibralter-based online gambling business and, apparently, a heavy Riak user. The intention is to open source the entire range of Basho key/value and time-series databases and associated products.

OmniDB 2.0 - 2nd Quadrant has announced OmniDB 2.0, a complete Python rewrite of the preceding OmniDB versions which were ASP.net/C# apps. OmniDB 2.0 offers a web-based graphical environment for working with PostgreSQL databases which can happily run as a desktop app too. It has all the things you'd expect – a tree view of the database and query builder – and some you wouldn't, like graph visualizations, SQL history, and themes. With an open source license and an ambition to span multiple databases (PostgreSQL only at the moment), it's one to watch.

SQLCheck - Getting it's first public release, SQLCheck is a utility that points out SQL anti-patterns. Those can be anything from missing primary keys and doing SELECT * when you only want a few fields, to dodging inefficient commands or curious implementations. As with all patterns and anti-patterns, some can definitely be up for debate but it looks like another useful tool for the developer's arsenal. And it leads you to the term Metadata Tribbles.

JavaScript Stores - Over at The Morning Paper, a rather interesting review of a paper looking at how a team tasked with providing procedural access to a DRAM-based key/value store found JavaScript to be the leading candidate to be embedded in the server. The browser's demands for isolation seem to have paid off for JavaScript and the next step is to embed the V8 engine in the RAMCloud server.

GIS for other worlds - A posting on Boston GIS points out that the PostgreSQL/PostGIS geography types are perfectly capable of handling other world topographies.

Developer Bits

Go 1.9 - The latest version of Go has landed. With Go 1.9's release there's a new feature, type aliasing, to help refactoring and other code repairs. That's joined by a math/bits package for bit manipulation which is able to use CPU level instructions, a concurrency safe Map type and faster compilation through concurrent compiling of package functions.

gocqlx - The folks at ScyllaDB have put together a rather interesting package for Go called gocqlx. CQL is the query language for Cassandra, and by extension, the Scylla database and gocql is the Go language library for CQL. The gocqlx package extends the gocql package in the same way that sqlx extends Go's sql package with lots of utilities and helpers and a reflection package which is compatible with sqlx models.

And Finally

When you dig into history, strange things come out. Take this tale of looking into a fake RAM chip where the fake inside was nothing to do with a RAM chip and along the way, learn how the touch tone phone originally worked and how it evolved.

NewsBits. News in bits, every Friday at Compose.

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Dj Walker-Morgan is Compose's resident Content Curator, and has been both a developer and writer since Apples came in II flavors and Commodores had Pets. Love this article? Head over to Dj Walker-Morgan’s author page to keep reading.